Six new fact-checkers join global journalism movement
Updated Reporters' Lab database now counts 75 projects actively verifying what politicians say and promise.
By Shaker Samman - October 19, 2015
A half-dozen fact-checkers in five countries are adding their work to the growing list of news organizations and websites that actively verify what politicians tell their constituents around the globe.
With these and other updates to our international database, the tally from the Duke Reporters’ Lab now has 75 active fact-checking services. That includes seven other established fact-checkers that weren’t previously listed in the database, several of which have powered back up to cover the 2016 presidential race in the United States. We’ve also updated our tally of inactive sites. (Map and List)
The newcomers include:
Aos Fatos, Brazil: Aos Fatos aims to raise the level of political discourse in Brazil. A profile of the site says the site’s creators got their inspiration from PolitiFact in the United States and Chequeado in Argentina. The website launched in July 2015.
Capdema’s L’Arbitre, Morocco: Based in the capital city of Rabat, Capdema is short for “Cap Democracy Morocco,” a network of young Moroccan activists. The weekly magazine Tel Quel has worked with the group on some initial fact-checking efforts as the publication and youth group collaborate to build out L’Arbitre (“The Referee”).
NPR, United States: Four years ago, NPR listeners responding to an audience survey told the Washington, D.C.-based public radio network that fact-checking topped their list as the most important kind of political reporting. For the 2016 campaign, NPR has concentrated its fact-checking efforts into a recurring feature called “Break It Down.”
Polétika, Spain: Founded in 2015, Polétika was created by a coalition of activist groups. Its site is built around a database of political promises, with fact-checkers monitoring and evaluating claims made by politicians and political parties in the run-up to Spain’s general election this December.
PolitiFact Missouri, United States: The newest member of the PolitiFact family is a partnership between the U.S. fact-checking site operated by the Tampa Bay Times in Florida and the University of Missouri School of Journalism in Columbia. The site fact-checks claims made by local, state and national officials.
South Asia Check, Nepal: Based in Kathmandu, South Asia Check was founded in 2015 by Panos South Asia, a non-governmental organization focused on regional media development. In addition to fact-checking politicians and other government officials, the site monitors promises related to recovery efforts since the region’s April 2015 earthquake. The fact-checkers concentrate mainly on Nepal, but occasionally review statements made elsewhere in the region.
In addition to these six new fact-checkers, we added several others that were not previously listed in the database, including:
Viralgranskaren, Sweden: Based in Stockholm and founded in 2014, this myth-busting website is a branch of Metro, Sweden’s free daily newspaper. It checks into viral online statements, such as Facebook pricing myths or claims about the Earth’s appearance without water.
Media Fact Checking Service, Macedonia: This project began in 2013 with a 30-month mission to fact-check Macedonian media reports. The fact-checking portion of the website is presented by the Metamorphosis Foundation for Internet and Society, and is available in English, Macedonian and Albanian.
The other established fact-checkers we’ve added are the AP, the New York Times and Politico, along with two local news offerings: TV reporter Pat Kessler’s regular Reality Checks on CBS Minnesota and Seattle talk radio host Jason Rantz’s #FactCheck segments for KIRO-FM and MYNorthwest.com. (We selfishly wish all fact-checkers provided a handy, one-stop link for their work the way CBS Minnesota does, but the others are just a short search away — for the most part.)
The Reporters’ Lab database also lists 43 inactive fact-checking operations, though that number will likely shift over the coming months, especially as state and local news outlets across the United States reboot their efforts for the upcoming election year.
In this round of updates, Brussels-based FactcheckEU and Minnesota Public Radio’s Polygraph move to inactive status. The inactive count also includes three other U.S. newsrooms and media partnerships that focused on fact-checking during the 2014 U.S. elections: the Quad City Times/WQAD-TV Political Ad Fact Check, in Davenport, Iowa; Truth Test from 5 Eyewitness News in St. Paul, Minn.; and another Truth Test that paired the CBS46 news team in Atlanta with student fact-checkers from Kennesaw State University.
Please share any updates or additions for the Reporters’ Lab database with Mark Stencel or Shaker Samman.
Reporters’ Lab projects featured at Computation + Journalism conference
The Reporters' Lab projects on structured journalism and fact-checking were featured at the annual conference.
By Julia Donheiser - October 6, 2015
Two projects from the Duke Reporters’ Lab were featured at the 2015 Computation + Journalism Symposium, which was held over the weekend at Columbia University in New York.
The two-day conference included presentations about Structured Stories NYC, an experiment that involved three Duke students covering events in New York, and a separate project that is exploring new ways to automate fact-checking.
Structured Stories, which uses a unique structured journalism approach to local news, was the topic of a presentation by David Caswell, a fellow at the Reynolds Journalism Institute.
Caswell explained Structured Stories in a presentation titled the Editorial Aspects of Reporting into Structured Narratives.
Structured Stories NYC is one of the boldest experiments of structured journalism because it dices the news into short events that can be reassembled in different ways by readers. The site is designed to put readers in charge by allowing them to adjust the depth of story coverage.
On the second day of the conference, Reporters’ Lab Director Bill Adair and Naeemul Hassan, a Ph.D. student in computer science at the University of Texas-Arlington, made a presentation that Adair said was “a call to arms” to automate fact-checking. It was based on a paper called The Quest to Automate Fact-Checking that they co-authored with Chengkai Li and Mark Tremayne of the University of Texas-Arlington, Jun Yang of Duke, James Hamilton of Stanford University and Cong Yu of Google.
Adair spoke about the need for more research to achieve the “holy grail” of fully automated, instant fact-checking. Hassan gave a presentation about ClaimBuster, a tool that analyzes text and predicts which sentences are factual claims that fact-checkers might want to examine.
The Reporters’ Lab is working with computer scientists and researchers from UT-Arlington, Stanford and Google on the multi-year project to explore how computational power can assist fact-checkers.
Fact-checkers spin-up for presidential debates
With facts and falsehoods flying, political watchdogs are rolling out and reviving election-year features.
By Shaker Samman - September 22, 2015
Fact-checking season is underway, and some new players are getting into the act.
FiveThirtyEight, NPR, Vox and Politico unveiled new fact-checking features for the presidential debates that began last month. Others revived their truth-seeking teams, joining usual suspects such as FactCheck.org, the Washington Post and PolitiFact in their perennial efforts to verify what politicians are saying.
The fact-checkers often focus on the same claims, but coverage from last week’s Republican debates in California showed the varying ways they use to explain their findings. In its coverage, CNN rated statements on a scale similar to PolitiFact’s Truth-O-Meter, while the New York Times and NPR chose to work without a grading system similar to the FactCheck.org model.
As in last month’s first debates, hosted by Fox News, the Post set aside its four-Pinocchio scale, offering a single scrolling summary of multiple fact-checks before following up additional posts in its usual style. Politico’s Wrongometer, CNN and NPR used similar models. Others posted individual items about specific claims or packaged a number of individually linkable fact-checks together as a combined reading experience. There also were efforts to do some real-time fact-checking while the debates were underway.
Here’s a roundup from last week’s two-round Republican debate, which included a primetime showdown with 11 candidates and an earlier session with four others:
CNN: The debate host’s “Fact-Checking Team” checked 16 claims and awarded them rulings from “True” to “It’s Complicated” to “False.” The “It’s Complicated” rating was awarded to Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, who said Saudi Arabia was not accepting any Syrian refugees, and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, for statements he made regarding the Iran nuclear agreement.
NPR: The radio network fact-checked four claims as part of its new “Break it Down” segment — all involving statements by or in response to Donald Trump. The claims ranged from the real estate developer’s lobbying for casinos in Florida to the safety of vaccination. NPR didn’t rate the claims on a scale and instead explained the validity of comments.
New York Times: The Times examined 11 claims, including topics from Planned Parenthood to immigration policy. Like NPR, the Times did not use a rating system. They did, however, post their fact-checks during the debate as part of their live coverage. Many of their checks focused on Trump and Ben Carson, the retired pediatric neurosurgeon whose outsider status had helped him climb up in the polls after the August debate on Fox News.
Politico: The Agenda, Politico’s policy channel, applied its Wrongometer to 12 claims, focusing on topics such as Trump’s bankruptcy and President Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran. The group also scrutinized former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina’s remarks about Syria and a much-repeated Columbine myth. Despite its Wrongometer header, Politico’s fact-checkers do not use a rating system.
Vox: Rather than the relatively short, just-the-facts summations most other fact-checkers posted, Vox penned full-length commentaries on a handful of claims. Two featured statements by Fiorina (one about Planned Parenthood, linked here, and another on her time at HP), and one checked the candidates’ views on vaccinations. No rating was used.
AP: The news service fact-checked five claims, including statements from Fiorina on Planned Parenthood and the effects of Trump’s plan for an economic “uncoupling” from China. The AP did not use a system to rate these claims.
FiveThirtyEight: The site did its fact-checking in its debate live blog. FiveThirtyEight’s staff did not use any sort of rating system in its real-time reviews of the candidates’ statements, such as Trump’s claim about Fiorina’s track record as CEO of HP and President Obama’s likability overseas.
FactCheck.org: The fact-checkers based at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center reviewed 14 claims from the debates. FactCheck.org did not rate the claims, which included former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s statements about Hillary Clinton’s email scandal to Trump’s comments on Wisconsin’s budget under Gov. Scott Walker.
PolitiFact: Run by the Tampa Bay Times, Washington-based PolitiFact fact-checked 15 debate claims so far, and awarded them rulings from “Pants on Fire” to “True.” The “Pants on Fire” rating went to Carson, who said that many pediatricians recognize the potential harm from too many vaccines. They also awarded a “True” rating to Fiorina’s statement regarding the potency of marijuana. While the debate was underway, the PolitiFact staff tapped their archive of previous calls to live blog the event.
The Washington Post Fact Checker: The Post’s two-person fact-checking team reviewed 18 claims in a roundup that included Trump’s denial that he’d ever gone bankrupt and New Jersey’s Gov. Chris Christie’s story about being named U.S. attorney by President George W. Bush on Sept. 10, 2001. The fact-checkers also posted versions of those items in the Post’s debate-night live blog. Following its usual practice for debates, the Post did not use its Pinocchio system to rate these claims. But since the debate, the Post added more Pinocchio-based fact-checks, including items on Fiorina’s criticisms of veterans’ health care (two Pinocchios) and Rubio’s comments on North Korea’s nuclear capabilities (one Pinocchio). Notably both of those items were suggested by Post readers.
Students selected for research work at Duke Reporters’ Lab
Eight undergraduates will assist with news experiments and help explore the future of journalism.
By Mark Stencel - September 14, 2015
Student researchers play leading roles at the Duke Reporters’ Lab, experimenting with new forms of storytelling and exploring the state of newsroom innovation.
With the start of a new academic year, a team of eight students are donning white lab coats to help us map the future of journalism. Their involvement is one of the things that makes the Lab such a lively place (especially for this Duke newcomer).
These students will investigate ways to create new “structured” story forms that allow journalists to present information in engaging, digital-friendly ways. They also will track and help foster the work of political fact-checkers that are holding politicians around the world accountable for their statements and their promises.
We’ve just completed hiring our 2015-2016 team:
Natalie Ritchie: Over the summer, Natalie was a reporter for Structured Stories NYC — the Reporters’ Lab effort to test a new storytelling tool in the wilds of New York politics. She is co-editor in chief of the Duke Political Review. A public policy senior with a focus on international affairs, Natalie previously interned with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, worked as a student communications assistant for the Duke Global Health Institute, and taught English to Iraqi, Palestinian, and Syrian refugees in Jordan. In addition, she interned for Republican Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, her home state.
Ryan Hoerger: The sports editor of The Chronicle, Duke’s student newspaper, is a senior from California double-majoring in public policy and economics. Last summer Ryan covered financial markets as an intern for Bloomberg. Before that, he interned for Duke magazine and conducted policy research during a summer stint at FasterCures. He is currently finishing up an undergraduate honors thesis that examines federal incentives for pharmaceutical research and development.
Shannon Beckham: Shannon, a public policy senior from Arizona, has seen how political fact-checking works from both sides of the process, having interned in the White House speechwriting office and at PolitiFact, the Pulitzer-winning service run by the Tampa Bay Times. She worked for the Chequeado fact-checking site in Buenos Aires, where she assisted with a 2014 meeting of Latin American fact-checkers. At the Reporters Lab, she helped start our database of fact-checking sites and organize the first Global Fact-Checking Summit last year in London.
Gautam Hathi: A junior in computer science who grew up near the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Wash., Gautam is already working at the intersection of news and technology. Having interned for Google and 3Sharp, the computer science major is now the digital content director for The Chronicle at Duke. He previously was The Chronicle’s health and science editor and is a contributing editor for the Duke Political Review.
Shaker Samman: Shaker is a public policy junior from Michigan. At the Reporters’ Lab, he worked on fact-checking and structured journalism prototypes and co-authored a PolitifFact story on the North Carolina Senate race with Lab co-director Bill Adair. He has interned as a reporter for the Tampa Bay Times in Florida and The Times Herald in Port Huron, Mich., where he also worked on his high school radio station.
Claire Ballentine: Claire is head of the university news department at The Chronicle. She began working for the Lab last year, helping update our database of political fact-checkers. The sophomore from Tennessee also has blogged for Her Campus and worked as an editing intern for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park Association. She was the editor-in-chief of her high school yearbook.
Jillian Apel: Jill brings an eye for visual storytelling to the Lab. A sophomore from California with a passion for writing as well, she was the managing editor of the student newspaper at the Brentwood School in Los Angeles.
Julia Donheiser: Julia’s data savvy comes via a social science research project she started as a student at the Bronx High School of Science. With guidance from a pair of educational psychologists, she crunched statewide numbers from school districts across New York to investigate the effects of various social factors on diagnosis rates for autism and learning disabilities. Now a freshman at Duke, she worked on the student newspaper at her high school. She also wrote a food blog that will make you hungry.
Former NPR editor to join Reporters’ Lab, teach journalism at Duke
Mark Stencel will oversee student projects and teach a course in watchdog journalism in the 2016 campaign.
By Bill Adair - September 3, 2015
I am thrilled to announce that Mark Stencel, a leader in digital journalism and a veteran editor from NPR and the Washington Post, is joining the Duke Reporters’ Lab as Co-Director and will teach in the Sanford School of Public Policy as a Visiting Lecturer.
As Co-Director of the Lab, Mark will direct research projects on fact-checking and political journalism. He’ll oversee the Lab’s database of global fact-checking websites and help us design teaching modules on fact-checking.
Fact-checking will be part of a new class Mark will teach next spring tentatively called Watchdog Journalism and the 2016 Election that will include practical skills and philosophy behind accountability reporting in national and local campaigns.
Mark is a rare talent in American journalism because he has experience on the business and editorial sides of publishing. He held senior editing and management positions at the Post, Governing magazine and Congressional Quarterly. He has often been years ahead of others in journalism in exploring new story forms and alternative sources of revenue.
At NPR, he was the managing editor for digital news, leading a team of more than 60 journalists and overseeing the network’s reporting for an online audience that more than doubled in four years to over 20 million readers and listeners. At the Post, he was an editor on the company’s first website and later directed groundbreaking digital coverage of the impeachment of President Bill Clinton and the 2000 election.
He didn’t need a campus tour. Before he shifted to digital media in the mid-1990s, Mark was a science and technology reporter for the News & Observer, covering Research Triangle Park from the paper’s bureau in Durham. Three months into the job, he was drafted into reporting on campus reaction to Duke’s somewhat unexpected return to the Final Four in 1994.
Mark and I co-authored last year’s Reporters’ Lab report The Goat Must Be Fed, which explored the reasons for the slow adoption of digital tools in American newsrooms.
He was a political fact-checker before fact-checking was cool, having created a debate fact-checking feature for the Post in 1996. This year, he authored an American Press Institute report on the impact of fact-checking, which he excerpted in a Politico article titled “The Weaponization of Fact-Checking.” He began his career as an assistant to a legendary journalist who sparked the modern fact-checking movement, Washington Post political columnist David S. Broder.
Mark was the co-author of two books on media and politics, On the Line: The New Road to the White House (written with CNN’s Larry King) and Peepshow: Media and Politics in an Age of Scandal (written with scholars Larry J. Sabato and S. Robert Lichter). He is the board chair for the Student Press Law Center and an advisory board member for Mercer University’s Center for Collaborative Journalism in Macon, Ga.
He graduated from the University of Virginia with a degree in Soviet studies. But that was the year before the Soviet Union ceased to exist, so he often says his credentials as a media ‘futurist’ should be regarded with skepticism.
Study explores new questions about quality of global fact-checking
The University of Wisconsin study examined fact-checks from Africa, India, Mexico, the United States, Uruguay and the United Kingdom.
By Bill Adair - August 11, 2015
How long should fact-checks be? How should they attribute their sources — with links or a detailed list? Should they provide a thorough account of a fact-checker’s work or distill it into a short summary?
Those are just a few of the areas explored in a fascinating new study by Lucas Graves, a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin. He presented a summary of his research last month at the 2015 Global Fact-Checking Summit in London.
The pilot project represents the first in-depth qualitative analysis of global fact-checking. It was funded by the Omidyar Network as part of its grant to the Poynter Institute to create a new fact-checking organization. The study, done in conjunction with the Reporters’ Lab, lays the groundwork for a more extensive analysis of additional sites in the future.
The findings reveal that fact-checking is still a new form of journalism with few established customs or practices. Some fact-checkers write long articles with lots of quotes to back up their work. Others distill their findings into short articles without any quotes. Graves did not take a position on which approach is best, but his research gives fact-checkers some valuable data to begin discussions about how to improve their journalism.
Graves and three research assistants examined 10 fact-checking articles from each of six different sites: Africa Check, Full Fact in the United Kingdom, FactChecker.in in India, PolitiFact in the United States, El Sabueso in Mexico and UYCheck in Uruguay. The sites were chosen to reflect a wide range of global fact-checking, as this table shows:
Graves and his researchers found a surprising range in the length of the fact-checking articles. UYCheck from Uruguay had the longest articles, with an average word count of 1,148, followed by Africa Check at 1,009 and PolitiFact at 983.
The shortest were from Full Fact, which averaged just 354 words. They reflected a very different approach by the British team. Rather than lay out the factual claims and back them up with extensive quotes the way most other sites do, the Full Fact approach is to distill them down to summaries.
Graves also found a wide range of data visualization in the articles sampled for each site. For example, Africa Check had three data visualizations in its 10 articles, while there were 11 in the Indian site FactChecker.in.
The Latin American sites UYCheck and El Sabueso used the most infographics, while the other sites relied more on charts and tables.
Graves also found a wide range in the use of web links and quotes. Africa Check averaged the highest total of web links and quotes per story (18), followed by 12 for PolitiFact, while UYCheck and El Sabueso had the fewest (8 and 5, respectively). Full Fact had no quotes in the 10 articles Graves examined but used an average of 9 links per article.
Graves and his researchers also examined how fact-checkers use links and quotes — whether they were used to provide political context about the claim being checked, to explain the subject being analyzed or to provide evidence about whether the claim was accurate. They found some sites, such as Africa Check and PolitiFact, used links more to provide context for the claim, while UYCheck and El Sabueso used them more for evidence in supporting a conclusion.
The analysis of quotes yielded some interesting results. PolitiFact used the most in the 10 articles — 38 quotes — with its largest share from evidentiary uses. Full Fact used the fewest (zero), followed by UYCheck (23) and El Sabueso (26).
The study also examined what Graves called “synthetic” sources — the different authoritative sources used to explain an issue and decide the accuracy of a claim. This part of the analysis distilled a final list of institutional sources for each fact-check, regardless of whether sources were directly quoted or linked to. AfricaCheck led the list with almost nine different authoritative sources considered on average, more than twice as many as FactChecker.in and UYCheck. Full Fact, UYCheck, and El Sabueso relied mainly on government agencies and data, while PolitiFact and Africa Check drew heavily on NGOs and academic experts in addition to official data.
The study raises some important questions for fact-checkers discuss. Are we writing are fact-checks too long? Too short?
Are we using enough data visualizations to help readers? Should we take the time to create more infographics instead of simple charts and tables?
What do we need to do to give our fact-checks authority? Are links sufficient? Or should we also include quotes from experts?
Over the next few months, we’ll have plenty to discuss.
Coverage of Global Fact-Checking Summit in London
From Spain to South Korea, there was plenty of coverage of this year's conference, reflecting the growing interest in fact-checking around the world.
By Bill Adair - August 5, 2015
About 70 fact-checkers and academics attended the Global Fact-Checking Summit in London in July 2015. Here’s some of the coverage:
JTBC television, South Korea – Video segment by Pil-Gyu Kim (with cameo appearance by Angie Holan)
La Sexta television, Spain – El Objetivo and Ana Pastor highlighted at fact-checking conference
Arizona Republic, United States – Fact-checking is a global movement by Michael Squires
Open Society Foundations, United Kingdom – True or False? Fact-checking journalism is booming by Sameer Padania
Journalism.co.uk, United Kingdom – Two models to fund fact-checking as a ‘public good’ by Catalina Albeanu
Journalism.co.uk, United Kingdom – How PolitiFact handled live fact-checking for the first time by Catalina Albeanu
Journalism.co.uk, United Kingdom – Debunking photo-fakes: Advice for image verification by Catalina Albeanu
City University London, United Kingdom – Global Fact-Checking Summit Held at City by Ed Grover
Duke Reporters’ Lab, United States – Voices from London: Reflections on the Global Fact-Checking Summit
Duke Reporters’ Lab, United States – At the Global Fact-Checking Summit, a call to look ahead
Voices from London: reflections on the Global Fact-Checking Summit
The fact-checkers of the world met at City University London to discuss the growth and challenges of their unique form of journalism.
By Bill Adair - July 28, 2015
One thing stood out at last week’s Global Fact-Checking Summit: the variety of the voices.
The conference, held at City University London, was in English, but the 60-plus participants had wonderful accents that showed the great diversity of fact-checking around the world: Irish, Russian, Spanish, Italian, German, Bosnian and Korean, among many others.
Reflecting the growth of fact-checking, the group included representatives of new sites that have started in the past year or will be starting soon. The new fact-checkers included Enda and Orna Young from FactCheckNI in Northern Ireland; Dana Wagner and Jacob Schroeder of FactsCan in Canada; and Damakant Jayshi, who is starting a site in Nepal.
The most significant news from the conference, announced last Friday, was that Omidyar Network and the National Endowment for Democracy have provided funding to the Poynter Institute to become the home of international fact-checking. Poynter will organize future conferences like this one, create training programs and establish a website. The website will be welcomed by the fact-checkers who said they need a place to discuss common problems and share best practices.
We began the conference with a video montage that captured the wide range of fact-checking segments on TV:
I was especially impressed by the TV segments from El Objetivo, a program on La Sexta in Spain, and the program Virus on Rai, the public television network in Italy. (U.S. networks could learn some lessons from the creative Spanish and Italian networks, which spend more time on production and do better graphics than their U.S. counterparts do.)
Our keynote speaker was Adam Chodikoff, a senior producer at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. One of Adam’s roles at the show is to be Stewart’s fact-checker, to ensure that even the best satire is grounded in fact.
“Chods,” as he is known at the show, played some funny clips and spiced them with comments about how he researches the segments. One of the clips was a Stewart interview with New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, when Stewart referred to a number that had been researched so well it was “Chods approved.”
Adam is not a journalist in the traditional sense, but he showed how serious he is about research and fact-checking by attending all of the sessions in the two-day conference.
The conference featured a wide range of presentations that showcased interesting work being done around the world: the commitment to research and development by Chequeado in Argentina; a new PolitiFact browser extension that will allow readers to request fact-checks of a phrase and Pagella Politica’s efforts to earn revenue from the leftovers of its reporting.
One of the most popular sessions at the conference was the in-depth discussion about sustainability and revenue sources that Alexios Mantzarlis of Pagella Politica led on Friday. His interview with Ivana Cvetkovic Bajrovic of the National Endowment for Democracy provided great insights for fact-checkers seeking grants for their organizations. Laura Zommer from Chequeado and Mevan Babakar from Full Fact also provided some great tips on crowdfunding.
There were many other great sessions throughout conference, and I think everybody agreed the two days went by too fast. But I came away with a common theme: As we build our community, we’ll get the best ideas from each other.
That brings me back to the voices. There were some great individual voices with some marvelous accents. But as a community, we’re getting louder.
At the Global Fact-Checking Summit, a call to look ahead
At the second international conference, the director of the Reporters' Lab says fact-checkers need to focus on funding and technology.
By Bill Adair - July 23, 2015
My opening remarks at the Global Fact-Checking Summit at City University London, July 23, 2015:
This is an exciting time for fact-checking around the world.
A year ago, we had 44 active fact-checking groups. Today we have 64. We’ve got new sites in countries where there hasn’t been any fact-checking before — South Korea and Turkey and Uruguay. And we’ve got many fact-checking sites in Latin America thanks in part to the energetic work of Laura Zommer and her talented colleagues at Chequeado.
And joining us today are journalists from brand-new fact-checking sites just getting started in Nepal, Canada, Northern Ireland and Russia.
Wow. Think about what is happening here: politicians in Nepal and Canada and Mexico and Northern Ireland and Russia are now going to be held accountable in ways that they never have before.
Fact-checking has become a powerful and important new form of accountability journalism around the world. We should be very proud of what we’ve accomplished.
There are some great stories about our impact.
In South Africa, Africa Check has become such an important part of the news ecosystem that when someone from the main opposition party gives a speech, the party routinely issues a standard form – they call it the “Africa Check Response Form” – to list sources that back up claims the politician is making during the speech.
In Italy, a politician posted on his Facebook page that several thousand policemen had tested positive for tuberculosis because they had come into contact with immigrants crossing the Mediterranean illegally. The rumor fueled fears in Italy that the disease was about to become an epidemic. Pagella Politica fact-checked the claim and found it was ridiculously false. When confronted with the fact-check on a radio interview, the politician had the good sense to apologize for spreading a false rumor.
In the United States, fact-checkers are already uncovering falsehoods of the 2016 presidential candidates at a remarkable pace — and the election is more than a year away.
From governors to U.S. senators, American politicians are frequently citing the U.S. fact-checkers — and are clearly changing their behavior because they know they are being checked. Jeb Bush, Rick Perry and Marco Rubio, three of the Republican presidential candidates, have all said they are more careful what they say because they know they are being fact-checked — and this is the term they used — “PolitiFacted.”
This is a wonderful moment for our movement. In hundreds of ways big and small, fact-checking has changed the world.
But rather than spend a lot of time celebrating the progress we’ve made, this week I think we should focus on the future and discuss some of our common problems and challenges.
We need to talk candidly about our readership. Although our audience is growing, it is still way too small. I expect that in most countries, fact-checks reach only a tiny percentage of voters.
We can’t be complacent and wait for people to come to our sites. We must expand our audiences through creative marketing and partnerships with larger media organizations. We must get our fact-checking in the old media — on TV and radio and in newspapers — even as we experiment with new media.
We also have to find new ways to make our content engaging. As we all know from looking at our metrics, there is a limited audience that wants to read lengthy policy articles. We need to find ways to make our content lively while still maintaining depth and substance.
We also need to focus on the quality of our journalism. Tomorrow morning Lucas Graves will be unveiling the first content analysis of fact-checking around the world. I’m hopeful it will lead to a thorough discussion of our best practices and, later this year, to a more extensive analysis of more sites in more countries.
We’ve devoted the longest session at the conference to the most significant challenge fact-checkers are facing — how to pay for our journalism. If you’ve looked at the database of fact-checkers I keep on the website of the Duke Reporters’ Lab, you’ve probably noticed that sites are marked “Active” or “Inactive.”
We do that because sites come and go, particularly after elections. In some cases, that’s because news organizations mistakenly believe that fact-checking is only needed during a campaign (Do news executives really think politicians stop lying on election day?). In most cases, sites go inactive because the funding dried up.
So at the conference this week, we must explore a wide variety of ways to pay for our important journalism. We can’t depend solely on foundations the way many of us have done. Likewise, those of us who have been fortunate enough to have been supported by legacy media organizations like newspapers and television networks would also be wise to find additional sources of revenue.
We need to think broadly and be creative. We can find long-term success the same way investors do: by diversifying. If we seek different types of revenue from more sources, we’ll be less vulnerable when one goes away.
As we look to the future, we also need to embrace technology and the power of computing. We’ve had a fascinating discussion about computing on our listserv a couple of weeks ago. But in that discussion and some others, I’ve heard a few hints that fact-checkers still have a skepticism about technology — the belief that computers won’t be able to do the work of human journalists. As one commenter put it, computers aren’t capable of assessing the complexity of politics and propaganda
I rate that statement Half True. While it’s true that computers can’t write fact-checks for us – yet – we have found ways they can help with our analysis, particularly with mundane and repetitive tasks.
As you’ll see in a session tomorrow, research projects at Duke, the University of Texas at Arlington and other places are showing great promise in using computational power to help journalists do fact-checking. Actually, computers CAN assess rhetoric and propaganda.
Although we are still years away from completely automated fact-checking — letting the robots do fact-checking for us — we have made tremendous progress in just the past year.
I think we’re just three to five years away from the point when automation can do many of the tasks of human fact-checkers — helping us find factual claims, helping us assess whether claims are accurate and providing automated ways to broadcast our fact-checks to much larger audiences.
We should not be afraid of technological progress. It will help us be better journalists and it will help us spread our messages to more people.
I’m glad you’re here. We’ve got some lively discussions ahead. Whether we’re talking about our challenges with funding, the importance of lively content or the promise of new technology, our goal is the same: To hold people in power accountable for their words.
Snapshot of fact-checking around the world, July 2015
Fact-checking continues to grow, with 20 new sites since last summer
By Bill Adair - July 19, 2015
Fact-checking continues to grow around the world.
As we convene the second annual Global Summit of Fact-Checking in London this week, there are now 64 active sites, up from 44 a year ago.
Here’s a snapshot of the latest numbers from the Duke Reporters’ Lab database. Last year’s numbers are in parentheses.
- Active fact-checking sites: 64 (44)
- Total sites that have been active in past few years*: 102 (59)
- Sites that are affiliated with news organizations: 63 percent
- Percentage of sites that use rating systems such as meters or labels: 80 (70)
- Number of active sites that track politicians’ campaign promises: 21 of 64
*Some sites have been active only for elections or have been suspended because of lack of funding. We still include the dormant sites in our database because they often resume operation.